5 things I Learned: Recruiting for Creative Diversity
I’ve been expanding my team at NOWNESS and have learned an immense amount, but here’s an immediate five:
1. Document Titles are Important
Think about it, the person you’re sending in an application to will probably be looking at a folder of dozens if not hundreds of CVs. If yours is just called CV 2016 then it’s going to be really hard for the person navigating said folder to remember which they’ve looked at and who they belong to.
Always have your name, and probably the company or job title you’re after, as the document title. It’ll show that you’ve thought about your audience (they are the person you want a job from after all) and it will also show you’ve tailored your approach to the place you want to work. Simple but effective, because caring about the details is essential.
2. Know Your Limits
Sure, being in an interview is all about trying to impress upon your interviewers the very best of you. But a really clear response to a skill or an experience point you don’t have can be just as useful as selling what you do have.
Saying you’ve not done that specific thing, but that is precisely why you’re in the interview, it’s something you want to grow, is great to hear. No-one knows everything, and recognising that shows a valuable self awareness.
3. Ask Great Questions
I’m incredibly lucky that every single person I’ve interviewed over the last couple of months has asked some great questions.
They were great because weren’t questions that were simply properly considered and prepared. Most importantly for me the question came from the candidate’s personal point of view and was genuinely something they wanted to know because it impacted on what the role meant or could achieve.
It also showed that they were interviewing us too. And that’s what it’s all about, because I think the process should genuinely be a two-way decision.
I realise I probably haven’t done this enough myself in the past, and I love being made to up my own game by people who are about to join my team.
4. Audience Centric Thinking Wins
It’s great when people have clearly tailored their approach to the team and the role in CVs and cover letters. But taking it that extra mile in simple and thoughtful ways is always going to impress.
One candidate sent a film they’d made for us as part of their application. We’re a video channel, and so they wanted to communicate to us in our form.
It made the whole application stand out from the pack. While that takes extra effort, when well done, it pays off (in the first selection round at least). It’s essentially user-centred design,and as a digital platform it’s great to see candidates who think about that naturally.
5. Diversity is Difficult: Because of Me
I think it’s fairly widely accepted that low levels of diversity in organisations stems from the conscious or unconscious desire to hire what you know: people like you. When you see people similar to yourself you share language, experiences and attitudes towards the world.
It’s comfortable. It’s conservative. It’s cliquey. It’s, at worst, corrupt.
As a truly global channel, albeit one predominantly based in the UK, it’s vital that we fight that easy option of hiring from within our own world. People who mirror us.
I am someone that benefitted from a time of greater social mobility and, without people having an open attitude towards me (and, frankly, a bit of conscious adaptation on my part), I am not sure I would now be in the hiring seat and therefore writing this post. So I feel it is a duty to always challenge myself to ensure we are not just inviting in, but searching for, talent from the broadest possible spectrum.
Having recruited five roles in three months, I have seen in a really condensed way how very conscious and concentrated this process has to be.
Perhaps a simple example is when interviewing candidates where English is not their first language. It’s not a question of fluency (everyone we met were envy-inducingly multilingual), but more nuanced things that unless you’re monitoring yourself, you may not see.
Tone of voice, use of vernacular, non-verbal feedback and even pacing of speech can have all sorts of subtle influences on how engaged, competent and confident a candidate will seem to you, from your social and cultural perspective.
Just as you should take account of, and perhaps compensate for, a candidate’s nerves in an interview that they really care about; you must guard against your own cultural biases by checking all the time where an overall impression of the person sitting in front of you might be coming from, as it is made up of dozens of these tiny signals.
If you don’t notice how these micro elements form and inform the macro response, no matter how much you think you’re championing diversity at a strategic level, you may not be on a practical one.
So, leaders, managers and HR teams, I make a plea to always push yourself outside of your comfort zone on every step of the recruitment journey, from the advert to the final interview and hire choice.
It is by no means easy – done properly it very much means a lot more work throughout – but it will pay huge dividends for the excellence and dynamism of your own company in the short term, and for the vitality and sustainability of our industries as a whole in the long term.
And don’t we all want that?
